The prefaces to this consideration of The Princess and Curdie are two.

First, I must highly commend the book to you, together with its prequel. MacDonald is a skilled teller of tales and includes many gems of insight in his stories. While I balk to call it a fairy tale (mostly because of literally the last page, as the previous is, while a little deviated from the fairy tale tradition, in harmony with it, but the events of the last page do not comport with my memory of the tradition), this work is an excellent fantasy story in the ‘teller of tales’ tradition (more like Lewis than like modern fantasy, having a sense of a man sitting  by a fireside as he relates the tale). Go read it.

If you want to read it without spoilers, read it before reading the body of this article, as I’ll be discussing the last chapter more than any of the rest.

Second, I must caution that most of my knowledge of George MacDonald’s theology comes from this article. While I’ll draw some connection to that theology, I understand it too little to give confident declarations. Much of this article, then, seeks not to understand MacDonald himself but to see what the story says, using MacDonald’s position as confirmation or prompting.

/SPOILER START/

The premise of this article is a set of four observations on the thematic implications in The Princess and Curdie. They aren’t a plot analysis, except incidentally, and they aren’t in-depth analysis of the skill of the writing (MacDonald is better than me, at least as yet). They’re theological and metaphysical ideas I see expressed in the story, intentionally or otherwise.

How People Change

The proper Christian conception of how men change has three facets: the downward fall, the upward climb, and the change. The downward fall is man’s state after Adam. Every man by default despises God (Ps. 14:1) and does not know wisdom (Job 28). He therefore goes down, down, down, gets worse and worse. Each path has its peculiarities (each man prefers different vices as his way down, at least until he reaches the bottom and his morality becomes the same as every other damned soul’s: complete rebellion).

The upward climb comes after the change. The change is salvation, particularly regeneration. In regeneration, God performs a miracle: He makes a man who hates Him into one who loves Him, born anew (John 3:1-15). Having changed, the man who once hated God now loves God at his heart. He still has much of that evil in him, however; it is a tree without roots. The upward climb is a man tearing away that ingrowth of evil in his character, by God’s strength, and making his whole conform to his center, love of God, a process complete only after death and the second resurrection (1 Cor. 15:42-49).¹

The way people change in MacDonald’s book is different.

More specifically, consider who changes. In all the story, Curdie alone undergoes significant moral change, primarily in the first third prior to his arrival in Gwyntystorm (the city in which much of the plot is set). The king, Peter, and Irene all undergo a minimal moral development as well. Beside this, we have only the case of Lina, who is heavily implied to have undergone a moral development prior to her appearance in the story and who engages in a change of sorts in its last chapter.

If we consider these characters, we find one common trait unites all of them: they are all good at the core. The king is bowed by sickness, and when he is no longer being poisoned, he becomes his old self, a little grown, once more. Irene and Peter both start as almost-paragons, uncertain or naïve perhaps but morally well, with a core of wisdom that the narrative does not challenge. Curdie, while he starts the story in an unpleasant pattern, is in a state of having fallen from former goodness, through malice and not thoughtlessness (Ch. 1-3).

The only exception is that Lina’s moral core is never remarked upon at all, but some implication could be drawn from the beast-man continuum expressed in Chapter 8 (as well as other hints) that the beast was once a desperately wicked person. This, however, is unconfirmed. If confirmed, moreover, it says nothing of her original moral character, just of the character she had prior to her current state. She could easily be a good person fallen.

All this is to say: the only people who end the story good are those always good (the old princess, particularly) or who began good and merely needed polishing (Curdie, for instance; Lina, in a way). This idea comports with what I know of MacDonald’s idea of salvation, for he seems to have little use for justification (certainly not in the classical understanding of it as a clearing of guilt), given he denied salvation to be a salvation from the consequence of sin.² While I can’t say it for certain, that theology and the character arcs of this book suggest to me that MacDonald did not believe man had a basically rebellious nature.

The story of character change this book tells is a story of how good must polish itself until it is more good. I use ‘more good’ because I think it’s clearer here than ‘better’: I mean an intensification of quality, not just a comparative difference. By contrast, the reality of change in men is this: to truly change, a man must be regenerated by the grace of God (the change). Otherwise he simply continues the downward drop, changing his path down but not his destination. Even after that change, moreover, his upward climb (sanctification) is built on that initial change. As such, MacDonald’s view of character development falls far short of reality.

Salvation’s Nature

The old princess’s rose-fire has a specific role in the story: it purifies. It allows Curdie to feel the true nature of a man’s character by holding his hand (a genius device which illustrates a recognition of man’s soul-body nature I warrant was instinctive rather than intellectual). Then, in the final chapter of the story, it is into this rose-fire that Lina, the monster not-dog, jumps and disappears.

The import of Lina’s jump is clear. This fire is the agent of the salvation she has implicitly been working out throughout the story. What is peculiar to me is that Lina disappears.

My theology of redemption would lead to a different result. Either Lina would emerge from the fire as a dog or a woman, something proper-formed rather than hybrid (built from two purposes, not one) and monstrous, or she would disappear, and a woman or dog (the narrative is unclear which Lina originally was, if she was ever either) would appear in the environs of the castle, strongly implied to be Lina remade.

This narrative choice rises from my theology, as indicated. I believe in salvation that is eternal life, body-and-soul, with God and in His glory’s light and giving Him glory (Rev. 21-22). George MacDonald, as per the article, held a somewhat different view (though I’m not sure what his view was, precisely). Lina’s disappearance speaks to an almost mystic idea of salvation as dissolving into God (a view the article suggests MacDonald had some affinity with). Now, we can’t speak too far about what MacDonald meant by it, not on the evidence of this singular instance, but certainly the message is incongruous with Christian theology properly understood.

Fruitfulness as Futility

The last page of the story (in my edition, but probably in most others too) is a whiplash which remained with me in the decade or so which passed between my first read-through and my recent re-read. In the beginning of one paragraph, we get the marriage, reign, and death of Curdie and Princess Irene. Then, in the remainder of the last three paragraphs, the undermining, collapse, and complete erasure of Gwynystorm from history ensues. The center-point of the story’s main plot, where all the characters turned their labor, disappears in the space of a few sentences, disappears so fully that literally nobody remembers it.

Here we arrive at an idea I do not know whether MacDonald intended, though perhaps it is truth despite intent. Perhaps it is merely a mistake.

The message declared by this dramatic choice is that fruitfulness is futile. Do what you want, build what you desire, be as good as you want, and all of it comes to nothing in the end, a rushing stream in the wilderness whose name men have forgotten. It is a singularly bleak idea and image, for a story superficially optimistic, bitter not because of tragedy (remember, all of the characters are long-dead, save possibly the old princess, when this happens) but because these sentences are a destruction of legacy and effect. They are saying: ‘Nothing mattered in the end.’ To which we want to reply: ‘So why bother?’

Contrast this view of apocalypse to two other perspectives: Ragnarok and Scripture.

Norse mythology knows how the world will end. It looks forward to the great final struggle of Ragnarok, and it knows the gods, with all the heroes beside them, will die. The forces of evil  and the enemies of mankind will win. Yet, the Norse stories declare, these foes shall not win easily. All men shall die, but they shall die on their feet, axe and sword and shield in hand. The myth has a masculinity to it which catches the heart and sets the blood on fire. It is a false end, but it has this truth: there is worth even in fighting a hopeless battle, so long as the cause is just.

The Christian, meanwhile, knows that the battle he fights, whose cause is just, is no hopeless battle, not for him. The Christian looks back to the apocalypse on the cross, where God Himself died, and he steps forward a moment to the Resurrection; he remembers the Ascension and looks upward to Him on the throne of David (Is. 9:7; Ps. 2). The end of time will come in culmination and proclamation of His victory, and then shall all men honor Him.

MacDonald’s perspective on the end mirrors the bleakness of the Norse perspective, but it lacks the vigor, for it never gives a reason why what came before still mattered. In great part, this has to do with the timeline. In the Norse story, men stand and fight and the end comes despite. In MacDonald’s, men do good for a while, die, and are replaced by others who destroy themselves. It all goes out not with a bang but a whimper.

Well, a city collapsing inwards is rather a large bang, but narratively it’s a whimper.

As for the Christian perspective: MacDonald does not look forward to a possibility of enduring fruitfulness and righteousness. A time of goodness comes and then it goes, and then comes the end. Man seems almost passive. The way his characters change, moreover, adds to this idea, for the ‘good times’ are products as a result merely of the happenstance of some persons being good enough to stay good, to even get a little better. The rest of men, who are evil, have no great change to their nature, ad so they self-destruct. (Yes, MacDonald seems to have held all men have a core ofgoodness, but he had also a great writer’s instinct for humanity, the instinct which often produces unintentional truths: that men are, as a rule, sinful.)

MacDonald wrote a great story, but in that story we see how his understanding of salvation, of human nature, and of man’s course all comes in the end to bleakness and nullity. The author’s skill betrays his own errors, and he sees it not.

God bless

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Footnotes

1. Theology names: total depravity (radical depravity, as per R.C. Sproul; I prefer ‘pervasive depravity’); regeneration; sanctification (and its end, glorification). I recommend Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray for more on the last set in particular. ↩︎
2. Salvation isn’t just this, but it does include it. ↩︎